Skip to main content

An Arts Update

Music:
Erica Mah. Fantastic Vancouver musician. This song is lovely and sad and SHE IS PLAYING TWO INSTRUMENTS AT ONCE!

Kings of Leon. They suit me this week. The quality of his voice is just right.



Arcade Fire. Specifically, "Rococo." Somewhere there are a lot of Arcade Fire fans that don't realize this song is actually about them.



Art:
Two weekends ago, I wandered through Trinity-Bellwoods Park and a maze of art tents (whoever rents those things must be making a killing). Highlights included:

Jay Dart, drawist. DRAWIST!! This brilliancy, combined with his beard art and reddish hair is enough to give me a pseudo-crush. And I discovered via his website that he went to Guelph. All the cool cats went to Guelph (what, what!).

Pam Lobb. I'd seen her work (and loved it) at Bluebird. Then I got to tell her so. If anyone wants to buy me some of her art for Christmas...

The Corey Canvas. Screenprinting of cover art for classic novels + birds + bearded cuteness = another pseudo-crush. If I ran a book club, I would have invited him to come out to it. We could read great literature and he could create cover art to commemorate all the books we read.

Erin Vincent. The day I saw "Cut-throat Bitch" from House in a coffee shop, she was buying some of Erin's art. I thought to myself that day, If I bought some of her art, I would be two degrees of separation from a famous actress. Plus, I really like this art. I told Erin this story. I want a whole series of her collages and assemblages on my wall.


Words:
This past weekend was Word on the Street, a book/publishing festival whose huge crowds have me convinced that the publishing industry is not about to become extinct. There will be (and already are) shifts in the landscape (that is SUCH a trendy phrase - shifting landscape...), but books, magazines and the love of reading are not going anywhere.

I subscribed to a magazine out of Montreal called Maisonneuve. I'm excited for the quarterly surprise of a shiny sheath of arts & opinions to show up in my mailbox; I am sure I will forget about my subscription just in time for the next one to arrive.

I also have a renewed desire to submit poetry for publication in a number of Canadian periodicals.



(I love Toronto.)
Labels:

Comments

  1. V2:53 PM

    i love Toronto as well.
    and miss it.
    if you come and visit me, we can go to african art galleries/shows together. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jackie10:20 PM

    This makes me re-love Toronto, if that is possible.

    Also, Jay Dart and I are tight now. He tweeted me. I could maybe do an intro for you guys.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thin
1 comment
Read more

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro
2 comments
Read more

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st
Post a Comment
Read more